Leo Irakliotis doesn’t just want to develop academics and researchers. The newly appointed dean of Nova Southeastern University’s Graduate School of Computer and Information Sciences also wants tech-savvy business people who can talk the talk of the corporate world.
It’s no surprise, really, but it turns out Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates is a strong supporter of the open-courseware movement that has swept through higher education in the last few years.
Grand Rapids Community College students were among the first in the nation to be able to rent their textbooks from their Follett’s campus bookstore, but now the company is expanding the program to colleges across the country, the Grand Rapids Press reports.
Although technically it was published in 2008, “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns,” by Clayton Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael Horn, made a huge impression in the past year, and its authors spoke at numerous education conferences in 2009. Their ideas proved quite prophetic later in the year, when a new online-learning movement emerged that is sure to send shock waves throughout higher education.
Personalized newscasts culled from the web and presented by digital avatars; baseball stories written by computers using raw data: Students and professors at Northwestern University are working to make this futuristic vision of news a reality, AFP reports.
The Read, Reflect, Display, and Do (R2D2) model is intended as a problem-solving wheel that represents phases of learning–from reading and exploration, to reflective writing, to visualization of the content learned, to attempts to try it out.
A team led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spread the wealth far and wide to locate 10 red balloons in undisclosed locations across the country on Dec. 5 and win a $40,000 cash prize from the Pentagon’s think tank, MSNBC reports.
An alternative to spending hours in a library sifting through books is now available at the touch of students’ fingertips, thanks to the work of a University of Montana alum, reports the Missoulian.
Panelists at a Harvard University discussion on Nov. 18 agreed that while modern technology can enhance education, it often creates distractions in the classroom, reports the Daily Free Press of Boston University.
Pattie Orr and other Baylor University officials take preservation seriously. So seriously, in fact, that the school dedicated a wing of its library to digitizing rare books, audio recordings, maps, and other material that students now can access online. Key words: Baylor University, educational technology, online courses, online libraries, digitization, digital library
